“In God We Trust” — But Which One?

It’s printed right there, on U.S. currency: “In God We Trust.” Is that true? If so, which god would that be? The one worshiped by the Sikhs who were gunned down in Wisconsin? The one worshiped at First Baptist Church of Oak Creek, just down the street from where the Sikhs were killed? Are these one and the same “God”?

This is a rich vein of material to mine for theologians, but everyone in the U.S. needs to pay attention to this, whether citizen, green-card holder, atheist, conservative Christian, cultural Jew, observant Muslim, and so many more. Much depends on how people understand this motto, and not just for internecine religious debates, but for crafting social policy, engaging with our political process, navigating cultural differences, and nurturing interpersonal relationships – everything, in other words.

I care about this for at least two interrelated reasons: 1) how to promote critical and constructive theological thinking in Christian communities about what we mean by “God”; and 2) how conceptions of “God” shape our common life in an increasingly diverse nation like the United States.

These are huge concerns, and a single blog post can’t possibly address them adequately. Here I want to make just one point and expand on it later in future posts.

Here’s the point: The God who is everywhere in general tends to be nowhere in particular.

I know that sounds woefully abstract, so let me back up a bit. That point began to gestate when I was young and saw, for the first time, Cecil B. DeMille’s wildly extravagant film The Ten Commandments. The burning bush, the pillar of flame, the boiling mountaintop – of all these rather campy film effects awakened my desire to find God somewhere and not just vaguely everywhere.

I grew up in a religious tradition (Evangelical Christian) that stressed what I like to call the “OmniGod” – this is the Creator God who is omnipresent (everywhere), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (all loving). I was taught this from a very early age. God was, one might say, ambient to the culture of my youth, something like the fluoride added to the water supply by the government – unseen, tasteless, but helpful in the long run.

Eventually, I found that “always-everywhere” but “nowhere-in-particular” deity rather unsatisfying, and also a bit ironic. The conservative Christianity of my youth likewise stressed the incarnation of that God in a particular person, Jesus of Nazareth.

I take that emphasis on incarnation as a clarion call to pay attention to the concrete and the particular as much as if not more than the general and the abstract. This matters in a religiously and culturally diverse nation like the United States, and for at least two reasons.

The Risk of Religious Monopoly
The God who is generally everywhere but nowhere in particular can tempt a religious community to claim exclusive access to the God in whom everyone should place one’s trust. This can lead to the particular, and therefore limited understanding of one religious tradition monopolizing all the other others. A religious monopoly invites hubris rather than humility; it invites hierarchical control rather than shared inquiry; and it invites spiritual practice that is more akin to a museum exhibition than a living tradition. A religious monopoly can also quickly spill over into a cultural monopoly, as the latest wave of anti-immigration energy in the U.S. suggests.

The Risk of Homogenous CommunitiesIf God is generally everywhere but nowhere in particular, then diversity becomes a big problem to solve rather than a huge gift to embrace. Differences of opinion must be silenced and subsumed under one broad banner; divergent approaches are treated as threats to uniformity; faith communities become isolated silos or religious versions of a gated community.

If God really is generally present everywhere, then God will show up in all sorts of particular places we might not expect, in traditions that our not our own, and always, as the Hebrew prophet Isaiah declared, ready to do a “new thing” (Is. 43:19; 65:17).

As a Christian, I find in Jesus Christ the patterns, rhythms, sensibilities, and insights that I believe I should seek wherever and whenever I’m looking for God, whether I find God in “Christian” settings or not. And when I do believe I’ve found something of God in non-Christian settings and people, that insight could well revise what I think about Jesus.

A religious monopoly afraid of diversity, by contrast, sits perilously poised on the brink of idolatry. Stamping a religious declaration on money suggests the same thing about a nation.

Comments

Jay, at 64 years of age, and growing up in the Anglican Church of Canada I also recall yet another descriptor for God in the 1918 Book of Common Prayer of my youth: ‘ineffable’- unknowable. I also remember an exchange with a parish priest of blessed memory, himself an Old Testament scholar, when apparently my eyes almost popped at great ranks of books lining the walls of his considerable office. Literally thousands of volumes.
‘Are all of these about God?’ a very-young me asked with some awe.
‘Yes,’ he admitted with some amusement. ‘They’re all about the study of God- it’s called theology.’
‘But don’t they agree with each other? How come there are so many of them?’
And therein, for me at least, lies part of the problem of the past- the patriarchal pronouncements masking as absolute statements about a Reality which the Church herself taught was ‘ineffable’.

As a Canadian, I will not presume to comment on what is printed on the American dollar bill. As a post-Anglican-anglican however, my hope is founded on a sense that once our Church has recognized and owned the limits of its patriarchal past, it will be free to live into a future as the midwife of the ‘life more abundant’ Scripture promises us in Christ. And my sense is that part of that midwifery will be as a facilitator; faith will be experiential and shared rather than doctrinally submitted to, and tradition will provide the metaphors and context for the inexpressible- for our experience of the ineffable. God would no longer be a battle to be won, but rather an experience to be lived, and conversations about belief might begin with questions rather than argumentative statements.
My faith is also that we are currently undergoing the necessary transformation from the patriarchal/ magisterial Church of the past to that lived/living Body of Christ, and nowhere more so than in the Episcopal Church. Part of this process, I sense, will be the Church coming to realize that she was never meant to be an end in itself, but rather the means- the midwife of that ‘life more abundantly’ Christ offers as the reason for his incarnation in scripture. So perhaps in the future we’ll actually find ourselves asking each other more often ‘where do you think God is at work in this?’ rather than waving our ‘God’ over the head of another like a cudgel to enforce our view of reality. Sharing our experiences of living into the sacrament of our lives, and learning from each other.

Jay, my apologies for not really addressing the questions of your post, however, some time after having read what you wrote, this is what comes to mind.

Jay Emerson Johnson

Some of the most traditional bits of Christianity are the most peculiar -- strange enough to renew the Church and change the world. I blog about what that might mean here, as an Episcopal priest, a theologian, a writer and teacher.

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